Moonfruit Lounge

Following a bulletin from Adobe, we are advising all customers to update their Flash Player version if they are currently running v9.0.159.0 and v10.0.22.87 for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Solaris. This upgrade is strongly recommended by Adobe.

To verify the Adobe Flash Player version number running on your system, access the About Flash Player page, or right-click on the Flash content and then select “About Adobe Flash Player” from the menu. If you use multiple browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera etc) on the same computer, please perform the check for each browser you have installed on your system. The page will indicate the ‘Version Information’ in a boxed section and list the version number e.g. “You have version 10,0,22,87 installed”.

If you are currently running Adobe Flash Player 9.0.246.0 or 10.0.32.18 then you don’t need to do anything. You have the latest version.

However if you are running another version, especially v9.0.159.0 and v10.0.22.87 then Adobe recommends that all Flash Player users upgrade to the most recent version of the player through the Flash Player Download Centre and take advantage of security updates.

More details on this, if interested, can be found on the Adobe Website Bulletin page.

Following on from the incredible range of creative and humorous responses you sent in, we decided to give out one last prize, an 11th macbook pro for the most creative Moonfruit website. Again the diversity and calibre of the websites produced have been impressive.

Thank you to all Twitterers and Moonfruiters old and new for engaging in this campaign with such enthusiasm, creativity and large injections of humour! We'll continue to chat to you about our new product innovations, things you're up to and interesting design stuff. We'd also like to continue doing a variety of creative projects with you in areas you are passionate about. We have some ideas brewing but if you have any suggestions they would be very welcome!

We'd also like give one big thankyou to Twitter itself. Without their boundary breaking, communication platform, this would not have been possible.

As explained in our previous blog "We'll pick the site that is most true to its stated objective and inspires us as a great example of what a website can do. Build it about something you're passionate about and are interested in."

People put a lot of effort and thought into their sites and to be fair to everyone we thought we should explain the process we've been through to choose the winner(s).

Late Friday night 3rd July, around midnight UK time Moonfruit finally tumbled off the top of the trends list on Twitter. Now this wasn’t wholly unexpected with July 4th on the way and the resignation of Sarah Palin. But what was odd is how it that it never returned despite the stats being above other trending topics. If you compare Moonfruit vs Wimbledon in terms of share of tweets (see graph below), you can see Moonfruit has ranked higher at all times except the Men’s final. But Wimbledon has been a trending topic several times over the weekend. I’ve also included data for Serena and Venus which have also been on the top trends list.

http://twist.flaptor.com/?span=168&gram=moonfruit%2Cwimbledon%2Cserena%2Cvenus

There is further data available at http://hashtags.org/ which shows popular hashtag topics. So on balance it looks like the Moonfruit tag has been removed from the trends list by Twitter.

We also sent an email to Twitter on Saturday asking them about this, but have yet to get a reply. It may be because it’s been the 4th July weekend, so we'll wait and see but given the profile of this story and the furore in the twittersphere we would expect them to respond?

What does this mean?

Ok, first things first. When we started this we wanted to create a buzz there’s no doubt about that. But we didn’t expect the campaign to become so large. And believe it or not, we didn’t want to dominate Twitter for 10 days, or push important subjects like Iran off the agenda.

But given how it has turned out we are also touched by how people have responded to the brand and campaign. We love how they’ve questioned it, played with it, joked about it, sung about it, painted it, made it out of fruit, shouted at it and made it what it is through their participation. We are in awe of the brilliance and creativity of the Twittersphere. So thank you all.

However, we also recognise that the campaign sets a dangerous precedent and could have implications for how Twitter is used and abused by marketers. This is a subject much commented on (see Mashable, Techcrunch, BBC), etc.

So if Twitter had come to us and said, “guys, enough is enough”, then we would have worked with them to limit the campaign, or complied with whatever they were demanding. However, if they have pulled the trending without explanation or communication, this sets rather a different tone.

Not to be misinterpreted, it’s certainly their right to protect their network and technology investment. (And incidentally, I think taking us off the trends at this point is the right thing for Twitter, and I’m happy with that response). But as a company that strives to provide a real time, democratic communication platform, we don't believe taking action quietly behind the scenes is the right answer, not exactly transparent. Particularly given the numbers of press, marketers, businesses and consumers on twitter following this campaign right now.

I’ve said it before in comments on other blogs, but this is probably a commercial channel for Twitter in the future (I’m sure they’ve thought about it! Maybe we've touched a nerve.) Perhaps there should be ‘commercial trends’ vs ‘normal trends’ lists. And its certainly been said that users should be able to filter their feeds to remove ‘commercial’ or unwanted tags.

What would help me is a clear understanding of what happened, and therefore what the new ‘rules of the game’ are going forward. What does this mean for topics on Twitter? What does it mean for marketers? If we were removed as ‘spam’, when did we become spam, was it ok for the first few days, just not after? And are the creative responses, videos, images, songs, etc. all just spam? (see 'Real people get creative with Moonfruit').

Two oil paintings of Moonfruit? A woman paper-maching her face to look like a moon (while eating fruit)? A ransom letter to Moonfruit demanding a Mac? A man making his lunch zuchinni into the words ‘Moonfruit’? Writing songs and penning Haiku’s? Teenagers dancing and producing films? Is this spam?

Maybe there's no right answer, ultimately only what the twitter crowd agree. Perhaps if they had been given a bit longer they would have decided for themselves. That's the intention surely of 'follow' and 'unfollow'.

What does the Twitterverse think?

Twitter, what happened?

Important Update – Big Bang Finale!

The competition response has been crazy and wonderful. Thank you all. But to bring the mayhem to a close and remain respectful to the Twitterverse, we’ve decided to bring forward the end date from Friday 10th July to Tuesday 7th July (e.g. this week).
This means all remaining Macbook Pros will be given away on this last day. Still 10 Macbooks, just in 7 days not 10. So there will be 4 winners on Tuesday for Macbook prizes 7, 8, 9 and 10. All will be randomly picked from the last 24 hour of tweets.

We’ll still take creative entries for discretionary prizes, so send them to us @moontweet.

And we’re looking at how we can have an ongoing competition for our customers who built the best new sites each month.

Once again, thank you all for your input, creativity, love and humour (and humor ;-). Best of luck!!

Wendy Tan White

Many of you will have noticed our twitter campaign that started on Tuesday to give away 10 Macbook Pros to celebrate the 10th Birthday of Moonfruit. Yes we're that old ;-). But I don't think any of us expected it to go quite so crazy.

We've been trending at the number 1 spot on twitter for the last 36 hours or more, our number of followers is approaching 20,000 before the end of the first 48 hours and our site traffic has increased by 8 times or more. Ouch.

Mashable (The Social Media Guide) has written this up as 'A Twitter campaign done right' and an SEO expert calls us bigger than Michael Jackson. And Brand Republic calls it a massive success.

At around midnight last night 300 tweets per minute were about moonfruit and this accounted for 1.63% of all twitter traffic. And including the Mashable article that was also trending about Moonfruit it was around 2.85% in total.

http://twist.flaptor.com/trends?gram=moonfruit&span=24

Interesting times. We're looking forward to seeing what happens...

To celebrate Moonfruit's 10th birthday we are giving away 10 new Macbook Pro's, one each day for 10 days! If you've never seen one of these in real life, they are just as svelte and beautifully crafted as they look in the pictures, we can't keep our hands off them! (I'm using on now, but not one of the competition ones obviously ;-) )

Check the full details of the competition at http://www.moonfruit.com/macbook-pro.html and follow us @moontweet to find out who the winners are each day.

We wouldn't be here today without all you wonderful people building websites with us and allowing us to support you in your online adventures. So a special thanks to the 2m+ of you who've built a site with us!

Happy tweeting!

Now that's the kind of customer review we like to read about Moonfruit and our website builder! Have a read for yourself:

http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/internet-sites/moonfruit-com-1/1226440/#rev

It's great to get this kind of feedback (actually both positive or negative) as it helps us keep in touch with what people want. And with the power of the social web nowadays getting reviews in public forums is always a boost.

So thank you mysterious reviewer "CokaCola" whoever you are ;-)

Members are people that have a relationship with your site, including their own login. They are users who have taken the step from being a visitor to signing up and creating their own account with you. Members can be advocates of your site and your services, along with helping you grow your site by telling other people about you (although they can also be detractors, so make sure you treat them nice!).

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Well, more half a dozen simple steps than just a few. But it is fairly simple.

Once your domain order is complete, you can associate your domain with your website. You can also create up to five individual mailboxes with your domain. Within each mailbox you will also be able to create as many unique aliases as you wish. Alternatively you can also forward your addresses to external email accounts like GoogleMail, Yahoo and Hotmail, which you already own or have access to.

For a quick introduction on how to set up your email just read the instructions below...